'Our Whole Life Is an Irish Sea'

Because of something I wrote, an old friend tells me he is reading at last, in his seventies, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton’s prose compendium of marvels. There’s a category of books with little in common except their uncommon eccentricity – Montaigne, Browne, Sterne, Boswell, Landor and Doughty wrote them too. They’re not for everyone, not even every ambitious reader, but for some sensibilities, those that relish a lifetime of autodidactically acquired knowledge, they stand among the great rewards of the reading life. Burton is scholarly but never blandly academic. After four centuries, a person could build a respectable education around The Anatomy. 

It was fifty-six years ago next month, as a university freshman, that I discovered Burton on the library shelf. I don’t know what attracted me to this fat volume dense with interpolated quotations, many in Latin. I don’t think I had ever heard its title or author’s name. Soon I had to buy a copy of my own. It's the Platonic ideal of a family of books Max Beerbohm dubbed “Bedside books. Dippable-into.” Pick them up at any idle moment and enjoy.

 

We know the book grew by accretion, like a coral reef or a galaxy. The first edition contained 353,369 words.  In each subsequent edition, Burton added more material. The sixth, published posthumously in 1651, with corrections and additions made before his death, contained 516,384 words. Burton’s prose, to use a word he favored, is anfractuous: “winding, sinuous, involved; roundabout, circuitous; spiral,” according to the OED, which cites Burton’s usage as the earliest in the language. His prose mirrors his mind, which was curious and accumulative. He loved catalogs and redundancy never bothered him. A characteristic passage begins, “Our whole life is an Irish sea, wherein there is nought to be expected but tempestuous storms and troublesome waves, and those infinite,” and continues:

 

“[W]e bangle away our best days, befool out our times, we lead a contentious, discontent, tumultuous, melancholy, miserable life; insomuch, that if we could foretell what was to come, and it put to our choice, we should rather refuse than accept of this painful life. In a word, the world itself is a maze, a labyrinth of errors, a desert, a wilderness, a den of thieves, cheaters, &c., full of filthy puddles, horrid rocks, precipitiums, an ocean of adversity, an heavy yoke, wherein infirmities and calamities overtake, and follow one another, as the sea waves; and if we scape Scylla, we fall foul on Charybdis, and so in perpetual fear, labour, anguish, we run from one plague, one mischief, one burden to another . . .”

 

I quote at length to give you a taste of the way Burton’s brain works. It’s helpful to remember that he chose Democritus Junior as his persona in homage to the Laughing Philosopher. Mike, enjoy Burton’s grab-bag of gifts.